Grymt

how desperate did I need to get?

( Originally Posted by Grymt View Post
Ah, there is a name for where I came from. 'Gift of Desperation'. Hmmm...who'd'a thunk it.

I still say it's a matter for the KISS principle.

I was being enabled by a lady who brought me booze and expected sex. She didn't drink. I had the dt's and had tried suicide. She was a nurse and had talked to a doc at work who said until I get into rehab to keep drinking and then detox in rehab under supervision. I think that was good advice.

First I kicked her out of my life. Then I gave a couple of mates my things to do with what they liked and then I rang the rehab and got a bed and time, had my last drink, caught the train and spent a month at the rehab, got away with a lapse, moved on to a six month stretch at a recovery farm, busted, another couple of months back at the farm. joined a travelling evangelical tent for the rest of the year, ended up in brisvegas, busted, locked myself up at a dryhouse for a month and finally I think I was trying to get serious. 3 meetings a day for 30 days. I saw friends I made there falling down all the time but for some reason I found the determination to keep going.

I managed to not drink when I left and took a trip around the world but busted in europe. Somehow managed to get dry and back home with the help of some great AA people in a little danish village. Back home met up with a lady I hadn't seen for decades, almost at the beginning of my drinking career. Stupid codependent relationship. Got a dui. Hunkered down to an unbroken 6 month binge.

Then finally, after all that, having never got the bit about av's, beasts, etc the craving was gone in 2004. I had a brief lapse (a day and a half, again a relationship thing) about 2008 and nothing since.

I got there by stopping drinking long enough to start to deal with life as it is sober. It took a few goes but that's it.)


The time frame covered by my post is about the last two years I drank. The last months before I went into rehab my sole concern was getting alcohol. I was living in a half built house, open to the elements, with no running water, whatever I ate came out of cans. My dsigestion was shutting down. My toenails were ingrown. (I discovered a way to get rid of planters warts: don't take off your shoes and socks for 6 weeks.(it was winter and I had no heating) They get disgusted with the conditions and leave.)

My day was: wake up, or rather become conscious. Locate the booze, start drinking. Smoke. Read. I had a tall stack of readers digest condensed books. When I finished one I dumped it through a hole in the floor, which also served as toilet. I kept drinking until I passed out. I repeated this without regard to what time it was. Approximately 3 cycles per 24 hours.

Once a week I bought booze. A big stack of cheap wine casks. Occasionally I'd heat up some water and have a wash and walk along the railway into town where I'd go to the free food depot and pretend to be respectable.

____

cut to brisvegas....

I had no money, having spent my last few cents on a cask of wine. I had lost my shoes and trudged the streets picking up cigarette butts and looking for somewhere I could get a bite of food. Shoes are actually quite important. Shoes and something to eat.

A priest told me there was a salvation army dry house that could help.

I found the dry house and got a room. I had to be in by 8 and couldn't leave til 7. I could only get back in for the night if I was sober. During the day I'd walk from AA meeting to another. That was the time when things started to look up. By the end of the month I was volunteering, teaching seniors how to use PC's and had made a couple of good friends. Then my dad died and left me a bit of money so I bought a car and headed south. My last big binge was yet to come...

bluedog97

Hell of a story. While I never got that bad, it reminds me where I'm headed, if I don't die first.

I picked up (another) white chip yesterday at an AA meeting. I felt judged. I've been thinking - who's surprised an alcoholic is drinking? The miracle is when an alcoholic is not drinking.

Grymt

Thank you. If there is one thing I hope for is that anyone seeking sobriety you don't have to go through this, there is a way that is not death. I pushed it to a limit. AA helps.

Unwound

Good post looking forward yo next installment.

Grymt

I once had almost eight years under the belt. I got the flu and was working without sick leave so I started sipping senega of ammonia, which has alcohol ( I didn't realise), and I discovered cough medicine (Ugh!). Within a couple of months, new year 1999, I left my family and started a tortuous journey towards my 2004 final break with alcohol.

In 2008 a relationship ended. I more by a habitual response to such events than a craving set out on a binge but the next day I came to and dumped the booze and haven't touched it since.

In other words: Even after long periods of sobriety I have to be vigilant. There is no magic 'cure'. There is no person or thing that can stop me from drinking. I own my sobriety. I drink becuse I cannot not drink which is why I don't drink. I stay sober by not drinking and when not drinking I find my self on a well trodden path filled with good advice on how to proceed.

Grymt

I believe I have been an alcoholic my whole life. I didn't drink to excess till I was 18 but that was a blackout.

When I was 26 I thought I'd met the woman for life. We'd drink occasionally and moderately together. On a couple of occasions she'd come home really drunk which I could empathise with. One night I turned up at her place and found her in bed with another guy. It was devastating. I went on a three week bender which ended up with me very sick and when I came to I found that a kind of zest for life I've always had was gone. That event has defined my life. Ever since it's always been about finding a way to get over that. I thought I loved her so much and that I was at fault. She was a good wonderful person and wouldn't have done that if I hadn't been so wrong for her. et.c.. Or basically just plain wrong.

Most of my many relationships, and infidelities, after that were with women who did not drink. Invariably I would ruin the relationship. I think I always compared them to her and would punish them by wrecking the relationship often by drinking excessively and or cheating on them.

It wasn't until years later after doing Primal Therapy (A.Janov) followed by many Vipassana Meditation (Goenka) courses that I rediscovered that zest that I had thought had died forever.

I met the woman who became the mother of my daughters. I didn't smoke or drink for 7 years but in the end I started secretly taking drugs and being unfaithful.

In the end I came clean to my partner and started to try to get to a solution. I left my family and started doing the rehab rounds I described earlier and in the end the craving left me. I'm still an alcoholic but I don't drink.

I'm still working on myself and it's only till today that some things may be coming together to enable closure at last. I think she might have been an alcoholic. I don't know. I don't know if it even matters. I try to find some way to get past it still after all these years. WTF.

entropy1964

I'm so sorry for the heartbreak. My ex boyfriend had not 1, not 2, but 3 women cheat on him. Two wives, one fiancé. Cheating is never ok....I've done it, I know. It isn't the fault of the person being cheated on, it's the fault of the cheater.

Even if the person is the biggest Azz in the world, you leave the relationship, not cheat. I am quite sure his experiences, especially the first, really shattered his heart.

Grymt

It's a tough one. There are so many ingrained contradictions. I love her and I hate her but I take that hate out on people who have nothing to do with it. That event controls my life and I try to control my life but I can't do what I need to do because I don't know what that is. I think I need help but I think I have no right to have help and what I ask help for takes me away from what I think I should be. I'm in a prison of my conditioning. I hate it but I'm terrified of doing what I should do to get out of it let alone knowing what that is. For a long time the solution was to drink which accomplished nothing except make the years pass and I still have to deal with it. Whatever it is.

Grymt

In another thread someone talks about unrequited love and letting go. Cetainly correct. But how? I think I see a glimmer of understanding. We were engaged and had expressed love for each other. I naively thought she was as serious as me and I was intentionally blind to any signs otherwise. Maybe the signs that were there exposed my own issues arising from my alcoholism and that was something I was already in perpetual denial about. When I first found her in bed with this other guy something snapped and my mind superimposed her face on his. It couldn't be. I refused to believe it. I asked him to leave and I dragged her out of the bed. She then asked me to hit her. Crazy. I don't think I had any real idea what I had gotten myself in for in the first place. I got out of there, I didn't want to see a truth and I started binge drinking right away. I never allowed myself to face the truth which had a lot more to do about me than anything else. If I can identify what it is I have to let go of perhaps I can start to do so. What a mess. I'm sick of this anger.

MissPerfumado

Love is the most powerful force there is. It is more powerful than addiction, because addiction is an attachment to a physical thing. Love gets tangled up in our emotional and spiritual selves.

The best way out that I can see is to explore the spiritual side of love. Compassionate love, unconditional love...

Do you really love someone if you can also hate that person at the same time? If we can love from the highest centres of our being, then should we not love a person even while they are cheating on us ...? Why do we not love our partners the way we think a parent should love us ... i.e., unconditionally? Would I not expect my mother to love me even when we are in the middle of a terrible argument?

I don't have the answers. I ask myself the same questions.

But I do know this: it's very easy to judge. It's very difficult to love well.

Grymt

I don't see my attitudes nor my actions as being mature. (Active alcoholism stifles the maturation process.)

The experience I had and the way I dealt with it seems to have left a very deep mark. I felt like I descended into a hell. One of the first things I did after the alcoholic fog started to lift was to try to forgive and let go. It seemed to work and in not too long a time I was working and living a life with friends and relationships but when I was by myself at night, trying to sleep, I plunged back into that personal hell. It was only by being involved with people and partying that I kept that at bay. It never left me. I just kept it pushed inside.

When years later I have long periods of sobriety it's still there unresolved. This attempt to verbalise it is part of an attempt to find closure.

Spacey98

Bless your heart for sharing. You will find closure.

Grymt

Thank you Spacey, I think you're right. I'm finding having just put it out there, even though it's all confused, has helped me to see it. The fast hold all that has had on me seems gone. I just feel a dull resentment when I think about it now. If I allow myself to feel that as well I think that will pass too.

Dee74

One of the books I speak of quite often here is The Shack by Wm PaulYoung.
One of the the lines in it really helped me

"How can you move on with your hands around another persons throat?"

D